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From SLAC Today: “SLAC’s Newest Facility Kicks Off User Run”

May 1, 2012
Lori Ann White

“After months of installation and commissioning efforts, SLAC’s newest user facility welcomed its first two groups of experimenters on Friday. They came to use the tightly focused electron bunches delivered by FACET, the Facility for Advanced Accelerator Experimental Tests, for two very different purposes.

SLAC graduate student Spencer Gessner aligns a mirror for FACET’s X-ray spectrometer. The instrument was just one of the many new instruments and pieces of equipment installed in the beam tunnel… (Photo by Brad Plummer)

According to Spencer Gessner, a graduate student at SLAC and a member of the team, ‘One of the goals of this first run is to replicate and then extend some of the results achieved by E167,’ a plasma wakefield experiment that took place at SLAC’s Final Focus Test Beam before it shut down in 2007 to make room for the Linac Coherent Light Source. E167 raised the energy of a few electrons from 42 billion to 85 billion electronvolts over a distance of just 84 centimeters – a little less than a yard.

In the second experiment, Ioan Tudosa of the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Science, a joint SLAC–Stanford institute, will also continue work previously done at SLAC, this time in magnetic switching. The magnetic switching technique, in which an electric field is used to make north and south poles swap places in a magnet, works more than 1000 times faster than current technology and could revolutionize data storage. Tudosa will expose magnetic samples to FACET’s powerful electron pulses.”

SLAC is a multi-program laboratory exploring frontier questions in photon science, astrophysics, particle physics and accelerator research. Located in Menlo Park, California, SLAC is operated by Stanford University for the DOE’s Office of Science.